Posts Tagged 'Slales'

As a member of the illustrious the SoftLayer sales (SLales) team, I have the daily pleasure of talking with any number of potential, prospective, new and current customers, and in many of those conversations, I've picked up on a fairly common theme: FEAR. Now we're not talking about lachanophobia (fear of vegetables) or nomophobia (fear of losing cell phone contact) here ... We're talking about fear that paralyzes users and holds them captive — effectively preventing their growth and limiting their business's potential. Fear is a disease.

I've created my own little naming convention for the top three most common phobias I hear from users as they consider making changes to their hosting environments:

1. Pessimisobia
This phobia is best summarized by the saying, "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't." Users with this phobia could suffer from frequent downtime, a lack of responsive support and long term commitment contracts, but their service is a known quantity. What if a different provider is even worse? If you don't suffer from pessimisobia, this phobia probably seems silly, but it's very evident in many of the conversations I have.

2. Whizkiditus
This affliction is particularly prevalent in established companies. Symptoms of this phobia include recurring discomfort associated with the thought of learning a new management system or deviating from a platform where users have become experts. There's an efficiency to being comfortable with how a particular platform works, but the ceiling to that efficiency is the platform itself. Users with whizkiditus might not admit it, but the biggest reason they shy away from change is that they are afraid of losing the familiarity they've built with their old systems over the years ... even if that means staying on a platform that prohibits scale and growth.

3. Everythingluenza
In order to illustrate this phobia of compartmentalizing projects to phase in changes, let's look at a little scenario:

I host all of my applications at Company 1. I want to move Application A to the more-qualified Company 2, but if I do that, I'll have to move Applications B through Z to Company 2 also. All of that work would be too time-consuming and cumbersome, so I won't change anything.

It's easy to get overwhelmed when considering a change of cloud hosting for any piece of your business, and it's even more intimidating when you feel like it has to be an "all or nothing" decision.

Unless you are afflicted with euphobia (the fear of hearing good news), you'll be happy to hear that these common fears, once properly diagnosed, are quickly and easily curable on the SoftLayer platform. There are no known side effects from treatment, and patients experience immediate symptom relief with a full recovery in between 1-3 months.

This might be a lighthearted look at some quirky fears, but I don't want to downplay how significant these phobias are to the developers and entrepreneurs that suffer from them. If any of these fears strike a chord with you, reach out to the SLales team (by phone, chat or email), and we'll help you create a treatment plan. Once you address and conquer these fears, you can devote all of your energy back to getting over your selenophobia (fear of the moon).

In this week's "3 Bars | 3 Questions" episode, I was nominated by Tom Blair to talk about SoftLayer's Channel Sales team and the competitive advantages our three partner programs (strategic, referral and reseller) have over our competition.

As you'll see in the video, we actually covered seven or eight questions, but the basic framework for the chat were these three:

How does SoftLayer define the channel?

What's happening in the SoftLayer channel program?

How does SoftLayer's referral program differ from the programs offered by competitors?

Because we had quite a bit of ground to cover, the video goes about 15 minutes, but I hope it's entertaining and informative throughout. Be sure to stick around through the end of the video to hear the best analogy I can think of for SoftLayer's program.

To learn more about the new referral partner program I mention, email referral@softlayer.com, and we can fill you in.

Since we recently announced an awesome partnership with TechWildcatters, I'm looking forward to hearing what SoftLayer VP of Community Development Paul Ford has to say about what else is coming up. Paul, enjoy the hot seat!

Will Charnock put me in the hot seat at the end of his 3 Bars | 3 Questions interview last week, so I welcomed Kevin into my office virtually to have a quick chat. He came equipped with three good questions about my experience with SoftLayer SLales, and I did my best to give three good answers. Here were the questions:

What makes SoftLayer different from any of the other companies you've worked for?

When you're hiring a new sales representative, what do you look for in that person?

What are you most excited about when it comes to the next few months at SoftLayer from a sales perspective?

This week, we used a High Definition video chat, and the quality is pretty impressive. We're still working to improve and tweak the format and quality of these videos, so you might notice a few blips in the audio recording, but we'll get those ironed out soon.

All in all, the video chat was a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to watching Drew Jenkins enjoy it in the next episode!

Anyone out there have a cool billion in cash lying around? If so, call Jerry Jones and you can have the naming rights to Cowboy Stadium. You know the one where they just played the Super Bowl and where they tried to break the all-time attendance record by putting in 20,000 temporary seats? Too bad the contractors that had been working 24/7 for 72 hours walked off the job 3 hours before the game and left 400 paying customers without seats.

With all that bad press, maybe you could get the naming rights for $800K now. If you want to give it a shot, you can send a check made out to SKINMAN C/O SoftLayer, and I'll do my best to get your name on the outside of the stadium ... even if I have to paint it there myself.

SoftLayer has lower rates on our naming rights. When we moved into our new Alpha Road headquarters, we were a little shocked to see how many conference rooms there were. If you've had a chance to see our office space, you probably came to the conclusion that it was designed with mouse/cheese-type mazes in mind. We had to figure out a good way to find things, so we actually decided to pay someone to help us name the conference rooms.

And so the contest began.

We asked all employees and a few outside creative agencies to nominate their favorite conference room themes, and we came up with quite a diverse list: Texas rivers, arcade game names (even though this one had been done before), beer brands, Scotch labels, football teams, colleges, types of Linux, processors names ... The list ended up including around 40 different themes. We voted to narrow down the top 5, and we let the C-levels and Lance make a final choice. The winning theme: Names that were significant in SoftLayer history.

With that direction, a few of us sat down and started thinking about all the things that got us here today. And BAM! conference room names abound.

Recently, our social media ninja gave you a glimpse at the conference rooms and promised that I'd come through and share the etymology of the names ... So here we go:

SLales – We tend to turn every word we can SL specific so this is the conference room closest to "sales" and we call is SLales!

CBNO – This is our large training room. As you might know by now, CBNO stands for "Challenging But Not Overwhelming." This is our internal mantra. Since the day I started at SoftLayer almost 4 years ago, this has been my life.

Geneous – Notice the spelling of "Genius" is incorrect. This is our board room ... There is a great story behind this name, but I have to let Lance tell it. If you want to hear it, leave a comment on this post, and I'll get him to throw together a blog specifically for this one.

Unicorn – If you've followed our blog for a while, you know that Sam Fleitman (COO) has been asked over and over to come up with things that just don’t exist. The joke became that he was always producing unicorns, and his office at one time was decorated heavily with they mythical beasts. In the new headquarters, his personal office is off limits (or so he thinks), so we dedicated a conference room to the memory of all the unicorns that have passed away.

Automation – Since we live it and breathe it, it was only fair that we name a conference room after it. If we do anything 3 times, someone is looking at automating it.

Innovation – We are bleeding edge, and that's the way we like it. This room is a reminder of that mentality.

204A – This conference room is the actual building name for this room. A poor lawyer was stuck in this room right after we moved in, so we assume it is haunted by a phantom that dislikes lawyers. We chose not to name the room in respect for that ghost.

SLacker – We had a series of blogs previously that showed a schism in our workforce workforce. I am in the SLacker camp. This room is dedicated to all of us.

Pink – We have a certain CFO - who will remain nameless - that always wears pink. This is his personal conference room. It makes him feel special.

3 Bars – Named after the small logo that we all know and love ... and are tattooed with.

SLayer – We had to throw the SLayers a bone, so we gave them a room too. Their jealousy of the beautifully named SLacker conference room could have been caustic.

Funky Truck – When the company was first starting out, this game almost single handedly stopped all progress. The original ten employees were a bit competitive at times, so this game had them each trying to one-up each other. Luckily they moved on to Facebook games.

05-05-05 – May 5th, 2005 of course.

Jeep – Drive through our parking lot, and you'll see the inspiration for this conference room names. Being in Texas, our parking spaces have to accommodate a lot of Jeeps, trucks, SUVs ... and even a Smart Car or two.

Muenster – 3 Bars BBQ! It’s almost time. End of April. Muenster, Texas. GermanFest! This is now a long-standing tradition at SoftLayer: Go hang out, have some fun, relax and eat some 3Bars BBQ at the BBQ cookoff.

Midway – This room is named nostalgically after the street address of our very first office.

As I was walking through the halls of our Dallas office, I happened to pass an door that seemed like an open portal into another dimension. Where you'd expect to finding boxes of cables and keyboards on metal racks, there were a few old wooden trunks lining the walls of the dimly lit space. Naturally, I had to investigate.

As I carefully opened the trunks, to my amazement, I came across loads of books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among the apothecary books and alchemy texts, I made an amazing discovery: a few pages of Shakespearean literature that seem to have been written anachronistically about SoftLayer Alpha headquarters:

'Tis but thy name that is my mystery;
Thou art thyself, though not a meeting room.
What's a meeting room? It is not hand nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? That which we call a conference room
By any other name would be as productive;
So Sharkbyte would, were it not called Sharkbyte call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which it owes
Without that title. Sharkbyte, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Host productive meetings.

Now I'm not suggesting that Bill Shakespeare set out to write an epic play about our facility that just wound up being Romeo and Juliet, but since the date in the corner of one of the pages was "1593," I wouldn't be surprised. In a flash of clairvoyance, he saw into the future and puzzled over the curious names outside each of our conference rooms ... Only to come to the conclusion that while the names didn't define the rooms, those rooms would still be phenomenally productive.

Switch a few words in that original text, and you've got yourself one of the most famous scenes in Romeo and Juliet. No big deal.

What were these curious names? See for yourself:

SLayer, SLacker, Unicorn, 3 Bars, 204A, Funky Truck ... The narrative wasn't clear to him at the time, but they all have a special meaning and fit into a bigger plan. Here is a full list of the Alpha conference room names:

SLales

CBNO

Geneous

Unicorn

Automation

Innovation

204A

SLacker

Pink

3 Bars

SLayer

Funky Truck

05-05-05

Muenster

Midway

Sharkbyte

Flex your own ESP muscles and post a comment with what you think each of the names means.

We'll reward the most creative responses (and the most accurate responses) with SoftLayer swag of your choice, and in a few days, SKinman will post the real reasons behind all of the names.

I was thinking the other day about languages. It came to mind because when The Girl was about 3 ½ or so; she had invented her own language. She would typically use this language when she was "reading" a book in her bed before going to sleep. She would say “words” that had a flow to them, but it was not recognizable as English, or Spanish, or any other language. So one night, The Husband asked The Girl what language she was speaking, and she replied, without hesitating or missing a beat, "Green." If she got into the flow of her language, you could stop her while she was “reading” and ask her what something meant. My all-time favorite from the language of Green was the word "gronka." Gronka means mad, angry. (And no, this was not referring to me – she was talking about something in one of her books). Other words that I remember are "shun sho," which referred to a rash she would get in the winter-time from eczema and "magogle," which refers to an ogre head (don’t ask). Alas, Green appears to be a dead language like Latin, because as The Girl has gotten older, she has resorted exclusively to English.

And of course, we have our own SLanguage here at SoftLayer (in addition to the official, super secret, street cred, gangsta sign). We have SLackers and SLayers (guess we all know which category our pink-clad CFO falls under). And we have the SLadies, as in “The SLadies are going to happy hour, wanna come?” We can also add: SLimey, SLake, SLeer, SLuper, SLervers, SLales, SLOps, and the SList goes on and on and on….. I’m getting SLeepy, just thinking about it. Additionally, thanks to our international customer base, we have also added vernacular from other cultures to our SLanguage. Another all-time favorite: “Please do the needful.” This is used whenever you need someone to help you out or to get something done, as in, "Sean, I need a fully-executed copy of the lease from our Landlord (SLandlord??), please do the needful." Great, isn’t it?? The phrase is descriptive on so many levels. Well, I need to go back to SLaving away on some SLegal stuff….. Until later, and let me know some of your favorite SoftLayer sayings!

Man, was this a weekend for me and backups! The first one I needed was for my second advance free fall course at skydive101.com on Friday (My Saturday). I jumped out of the plane a little early and one of my two instructors was not ready and did not jump on my call. Thank god I had a backup. Once my shoot deploys, being this is only my second jump out of a perfectly good airplane, I look up to check my slider and make sure my parachute is deployed and everything is correct I did not see my brake handles, I said some curse words I won’t put in this blog, and then was like it is OK I have a backup. I was still at 4000 ft at this time, still having another 1500 feet to decide if I want to release my main and pull the backup, luckily I found my brake handles pulled down twice and they worked and everything was OK.

So I get home after a day of skydiving and having fun in the sun (it is rather rare in Seattle, though not this summer) and I notice my trusty old Windows XP terminal has multiple errors on it. I do the first thing I always do with my personal Microsoft machines and reboot it. Ouch no operating system found, bad hard drive! Thank god I ghosted that machine 2 weeks ago as I figured the old IDE drives had been on their last legs. Saturday morning comes around, which is a big day for me, as I am hosting a party that night at a local night club. I notice I have a few (8900) email messages on my blackberry, so I decided it is about time to delete some. I tell it to delete, look back at it and 4 minutes later it says APP ERR. PLEASE RESTART. Needless to say, you guessed it. It wouldn’t boot back up and I had to force an OS onto it, and restore from my backup of a month ago, which reminded me that I need to start backup my blackberry more often.

So the moral of the story is, it is always good to have a backup, and we have plenty of backup options for you, so if you don’t have one, I would suggest contacting SLales. I would also suggest everyone trying to skydive at least once in their lifetime.

We have a pretty good sales team here at SoftLayer, quite honestly I couldn’t ask for a better group than the one we have. It’s pretty common for us to have various sales contests and awards to keep the team motivated and focused in the right direction, however last month I decided to try something a little different. Lance and I set a pretty lofty sales goal for the team (one I didn’t really think they would achieve), and told them that if they reached the goal I would shave my head completely bald.

As the month progressed, I began to realize the genius of this contest. The team was focused, driven by the desire to see their boss publically humiliated. SLales worked extra hours, came in early, stayed late, made calls, sent emails, followed up every lead, they did everything possible to exceed the goal. Looking back on it as their manager, it was a beautiful thing to watch and I’ve never been more proud of my team.

It ended up being close (down to the final hours on Friday actually). However, SLales stepped up to the plate and met the challenge. They worked together like a well oiled machine and overcame numerous obstacles, with the singular vision of seeing their boss embarrassed. They succeeded as a team, and here is the payoff:

After having been in the IT industry in some form or fashion for the last decade or so, I’ve learned that no matter how well you prepare yourself for disaster, you never seem to be surprised by certain issues that present themselves. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I’m talking about the many surprises our friend Mr. Murphy can throw at us. I’m sure many a tech will anecdotally speak of the time where their server borked on them, their backups failed despite numerous backup audits, and they were up the infamous creek (I’m only assuming at least a few readers are nodding right now). Sometimes painful lessons are the best times to learn, but it’s a bad day when it happens on a production server.

Working in the SoftLayer data center, we take incredible measures to protect our customer’s servers. In a sense, we try to keep Mr. Murphy away. From the biggies (like redundant power and MASSIVE cooling units) to the routine (such as the data center walkthroughs, and proactive RAID alerts), we do our best to keep the servers in the data center running smoothly, and free of surprises.

Beyond the punches our friend Mr. Murphy can throw at us now and again, it’s nice to know there are a few good surprises in store for you, too. You might be surprised at the great deals our SLales team can provide. You might also be surprised at not only the amazing features such as the new Cloudlayer™ Storage, but the incredible rate we keep bringing new features to the table. I’ve also seen customer’s surprise when we rescue their server from the brink of disaster, or when we are able to provide a few tweaks to give THEIR business the edge it needs.

Furthermore, our people keep the data center interesting. SoftLayer sees no shortage of antics. There’s John’s fully automatic Nerf gun. There’s also plenty of jokes played at the expense of someone unfortunate enough to leave their workstation unlocked (call it “security training” – favorite backgrounds include the Care Bears and My Little Pony). We also have that one hardware tech who likes to hide around corners or sneak up behind you, and scare the life out of you while you’re focused on the task at hand.

With so many surprises, SoftLayer continues to be a very interesting place to work, and most certainly a place where one would never get bored!

Everyone knows that the Sales team is a serious team of professionals who work well with one another, strive to break sales records, continue to help SoftLayer grow, and stand out in the industry among competition for a consistent job well done. But what lies beneath these driven individuals? There is definitely a great deal of personality and depth to our characters. There are many ways to find out about my peers (as if I didn't know each and every one of them pretty well already). But I thought a good way for you guys to get to know us, would be to find out what websites we frequent outside of work - that can say a LOT! Therefore, I have collected from each member of the sales team, their top 3 favorite websites. I think one or two of the websites each person submitted really does open a window into their personality.

Steven Canale (VP Sales):http://www.cnbc.com/, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/ and http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ - Steven is always well informed and up to date with the hosting industry, as well as the outside world and latest news. This gives you an idea of Steven's serious demeanor. Someone has to be serious, with all of the shenannigans (ahem, Douglas...) that go on around here.

Michael Miller:http://online.wsj.com/public/us and http://espn.go.com/ - These were a bit surprising, even though I know that he is obsessed with sports and money. Michael, Wall Street Journal, really? Impressive, but I cannot believe you did not include something that has to do with testosterone-fueled fighting, such as http://www.ufc.com/. Which leads me to Daniel...

Daniel Kracht:http://sherdog.com/ - Daniel loves Mixed Martial Arts, and there is never a Pay Per View fight that this guy does not order. If there is a good fight on, Party at Danny's!

Miz Mary Hall:http://www.somethingawful.com, http://icanhascheezburger.com, and http://geekologie.com – I had to include all three of Mary's because they really do say a lot about her. (Site #1) She LOVES the Fashion SWAT, and I agree you can get stuck on it for HOURS. (Site #2) Not much to say here, hilarious LOLcats all the way through. (Site #3) Geekologie used to be hedonistica.com. It’s a rolling blog of awesome toys, robots, and other techie stuff. The writers for Geekologie and The Superficial are absolutely hilarious. That brings me to mine...

Amanda Jordan:http://www.thesuperficial.com/ - I am addicted to celebrity gossip, and this is the ultimate place to go for just that, and it doesn't hurt that it is extremely funny and entertaining.

Laura Gardner:http://youtube.com/ - Also highly entertaining, you can get stuck on this site forever!

Michael Laude:http://www.howstuffworks.com/ - Our "Laude" is always looking for ways to expand his mind. And where else can you find out if you will die if you consume polar bear liver?

Patrick McElmurray, Chris McCallan, Doug Jackson: http://www.softlayer.com/ - I am going to end with the most spirited three on the team. They have chosen the one and only SoftLayer website. A few reasons behind this choice include "This is my whole world," "Contains all of the information I need to provide an effective service to our clients," and "Because it makes me money."